A project I’m working on potentially entails storing large amounts (e.g. ~5GB) of binary data in CoreData. I’m wondering if this would negatively impact the user’s Time Machine backup. From reading the documentation it seems that CoreData’s persistent store uses a single file (e.g. XML, SQLite DB, etc) so it would seem to me that any time the user changes a piece of data in the datastore Time Machine would copy the data store in its entirety to the backup drive.
Does CoreData offer a different datastore format that is more Time Machine friendly?
Or is their a better way to do this?
To answer your question directly, the only thing I can think of is to put your Core Data store in a sparsebundle disk image, so only the changed bands would be backed up by Time Machine. But really, I think if you’re trying to store this much data in SQLite/Core Data you’d run into other problems. I’d suggest you try using a disk-based database such as PostgreSQL.